Thursday, February 25, 2016

A Smoking Gun at Clinton.com?

U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton's home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as "top secret" because their wording matched sections of some of the government's most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

The State Department has already acknowledged that the emails contained top secret intelligence, though it says they were not marked that way. It has not previously been clear if the emails contained full classified documents or only some information from them.

The agencies did not find any top secret documents that passed through Clinton's server in their full version, the sources from Congress and the government's executive branch said.
However, the agency reports found some emails included passages that closely tracked or mirrored communications marked "top secret," according to the sources, who all requested anonymity. In some cases, additional classification markings meant access was supposed to be limited to small groups of specially cleared officials.

Under the law and government rules, U.S. officials and contractors may not transmit any classified information - not only documents - outside secure, government-controlled channels. Such information should not be sent even through the government's .gov email network.

The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

Hmm, I wonder how those got there. . . Now we need to find out who had their hands on both the original classified versions, and the ones that were scrubbed so they could be sent to Hillary.

Is this is, will this actually prompt the administration to do something serious? Don't count on it:

Loretta Lynch, considered to be on the short list for appointment to the Supreme Court by President Obama, deflected questions about the appointment of a special counsel to look into Hillary's deepening email troubles: Lynch non-committal on Clinton email prosecution

Attorney General Loretta Lynch declined Wednesday to discuss how she would make a decision about whether to prosecute Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over classified information found on her private email server.

However, Lynch did say the investigation and the Justice Department's review of the matter would follow the usual process and procedure for such matters.

"This will be conducted as every other case and we will review all the facts and all the evidence and come to an independent conclusion as to how to best handle it," Lynch said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday morning.

The issue, at least for now, is the decision process that Lynch describes. The decision to charge will not be made independently, as Lynch claims. Those career attorneys still report up the chain of command to political appointees, including Lynch, who owe their positions to Democrats (which is otherwise not problematic). An independent review would mean having a decision-maker outside of the DoJ review those recommendations and choose whether or not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, her aides, or all of the above.